Don’t worry about the Muslim Brotherhood. Don’t panic. Don’t freak out. The terrorist organization doesn’t inspire enough Google searches to be a force for ill in Egypt.
At least that’s the theory that some in the military intelligence community would have us believe.
A lot of your tax dollars were wasted by NPR to bring you this report:
Consider the debate raging in Washington, D.C., about the Muslim Brotherhood as the revolution unfolded in Egypt, he [Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, an Army intelligence officer and head of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center] says. There were concerns in the U.S. intelligence community that the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic political group, might come to power.
“If the decision makers could have understood how little the Muslim Brotherhood was animating the online searches inside of Egypt,” Sawyer continued, “how might it have led to different decisions or different discussions, at least, that were being held in the halls of Washington?”
In other words, few seemed interested enough in the Muslim Brotherhood to search for them on Google. So how much of a role could the group have been playing in day-to-day conversations in Egypt?
It is unfortunate that Al Gore hadn’t invented the internet back in the summer of 1789. Otherwise we could all have been assured that France stood little chance of becoming a military dictatorship. After all, hardly anyone – on or around July 14th of that year – would have had much interest in Googling an obscure little Corsican by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte.
– Written by Kip Hooker at TheVitaminPress.com
Source: NPR.org
This post was last modified on April 3, 2011
View Comments (3)
Did they search google analytics for "muslim brotherhood" or did they put in "derka derka derka" or whatever a native would enter in there?
Wait, don't tell me, there's a dozen intel agencies all headed by political insiders and run by nepotism and, gasp, nobody thought of that!
I smell a government sponsored switcheroo going on here! Remember when Salman Rushdi wrote "Satanic Verses?" I'd never heard of this guy before in my life but after the Ayatollah Khomeini served his fatwa to kill him for writing it, he was an overnight sensation! His book flew off the shelves of bookstores all over the world except, of course, in Muslim countries...at the time I couldn't buy the book because it was out of stock or out of print. Forget Google for the moment, maybe the Gubment wants our help to track down these nefarious Muslim Brotherhood types...let's hit the web links and see if we can crash Google looking for these guys!
"animating the online searches inside of Egypt" of course Egyptians didn't need to look the Muslim Brotherhood up on Google, they already knew who they were.
Not many people in the US knew who Osama bin Laden was on September 10, 2001 but he was quite the popular figure in the Middle East.